1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to floor care appliances and, more specifically, relates to a rigid housing soft bag upright cleaner utilizing an upper fill concept.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The use of upper fill tubes is broadly old in floor care appliances, many configurations being utilized in the prior art to provide an upper fill function to take advantage of the fact that dirt deposited in the dirt collecting bag in these arrangements does not provide the equivalent of a pressure head or plug against which the fan-motor arrangement must work as cleaning progresses further.
These configurations include tubes fastened to the inside of hard or soft dirt collecting bags, tubes fastened to handle arrangements and exhausting into a bag structure and tubes actually coincident with a handle that supports and fluently communicates with the dirt collecting bag (normally a soft bag).
At the same time, floor care appliances having rigid housings, desirably, only for the storage of reels and the nesting of motor-fan units or the like are also known in the floor care art but these, heretofore, have not been combined with an upper fill configuration so that the advantages of both a rigid non air bag receiving housing arrangement and an upper fill tube could be melded into a single, unitary cooperating structure.
It would, therefore, be advantageous to provide an upper fill tube arrangement that directly cooperates with a non dirt collecting hard bag housing that, therefore, could also be utilized to house a reel or the like.
It would also be advantageous to utilize the rigid housing to provide an intermediate supporting network for the top fill duct.
It would be even more advantageous to provide a mounting plate for the upper fill tube so that the floor appliance handle was independent of it and could be easily removed from connection with the hard bag housing.
It would be still a further advantage to mount the top fill tube upwardly from the mounting plate attached to the rigid housing.
It would be additionally advantageous to mask the fill tube and support plate, to hide them from view, by some convenient arrangement.
It would be still more advantageous to utilize the soft bag of the floor care appliance for such a purpose.
It would be even more advantageous if the mounting plate utilized for top fill tube supporting purposes was also used as the housing connecting arrangement for the soft bag, especially if the bag was trapped behind the mounting plate to obscure and cover the same to provide a pleasing appearance for the floor care appliance or cleaner.